


Save Myself

by CatsBalletHarveySpecter



Category: Jopper - Fandom, Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Flashback, Jopper, highschool jopper, joyce has a realization and hopper is in the right place at the right time, some type of season 3 thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-06
Updated: 2021-01-06
Packaged: 2021-03-16 13:09:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,222
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28582527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatsBalletHarveySpecter/pseuds/CatsBalletHarveySpecter
Summary: Joyce is too busy saving everyone to save herself. Hopper has never had any desire to save himself, but suddenly he finds purpose in saving Will and El. The two of them are too busy saving everyone else to realize that they may have inadvertently saved one another.
Relationships: Joyce Byers & Jim "Chief" Hopper, Joyce Byers/Jim "Chief" Hopper
Comments: 3
Kudos: 22





	Save Myself

**Author's Note:**

> This has been sitting in my drafts for far too long but she's finally finished! 
> 
> It began as a song ficlet inspired by Ed Sheeran's Save Myself but as with all things I write, it ended up going somewhere else completely and I couldn't help myself from adding the flashback because let's face it, highschool Jopper owns me.

_ Before I save someone else… _

He was a black hole. A  _ fucking black whole.  _ It took Sarah. It ruined his marriage. It nearly took El. 

Years after returning to Hawkins, Hopper found no point in trying. He drowned his sorrows in booze, pills and nameless women, and he was content. His life was a public mess, a private spiral of chaos, and numbing the pain seemed like the only logical solution. 

And it was a suitable solution, for a while. Aside from becoming the talk of the town, Hopper was living in his own bubble of misery and content, and it didn’t matter, because he had no one that  _ he _ mattered to. 

All of it began to change the day he found Joyce in his office at the station, frantic about the alleged disappearance of her son. It was the first time since returning to Hawkins he had someone else to care about. It also happened to be the first time he forgot to go home and drink himself to sleep, too preoccupied with returning Will Byers safely. That moment, Joyce impatiently tapping her fingers on his desk while she waited for him, was the onset of the rest of his life.  _ Everything changed.  _

They found Will. Saved Eleven. And he and Joyce reconnected for the first time in years. He didn’t think it was possible to go from strangers to teenage lovers and back to friends, but the Thursday night dinners Joyce insisted on at the Byer’s said otherwise. 

For nearly four months he attended a weekly dinner at the Byers. After two months, he ran out of pills to take. He knew they needed him to be there for them, that if god forbid that  _ thing _ came back, he needed to be ready. He needed to protect them. 

Things changed again once he found Eleven. 

He once again had someone in his life that was depending on him. And suddenly, nothing else mattered. He was a father figure again, determined to set a good example, determined to do it  _ all _ right. 

It snowballed once he took El into custody. He didn’t have time to wallow in his own self-pity anymore. He no longer looked forward to coming home and finding the bottom of a bottle. El needed him to teach her how to stay safe. 

And then, Joyce needed him when Will started having episodes again. And again, when they lost Bob. 

In the span of two years, Jim Hopper had gone from having nothing to having a slew of people he needed to protect. He’d been given a purpose and he was living to save the people he loved. He had yet to realize that they had saved him too. 

.

.

_ Numb the way it feels... _

She hated needing someone. The feeling, the implications, the helplessness. Joyce had been living for her boys for as long as she could remember. She would do just about anything for them, and that was always enough. 

She had never been the type of person that relied on others. Even while married to Lonnie, she depended on only herself to get things done; pay bills, help the boys with their homework and provide them with as much of a  _ normal _ life as possible. It was her driving purpose in life, caring for Will and Jonathan, which is why the day Will went missing was one of the worst days of her life. 

Finding herself in Jim Hopper’s office, begging him to help her, wounded her pride in an unrepairable way. She didn’t  _ need _ anyone. But she  _ needed  _ Jim to help her, to believe her. 

By some twist of fate, he does. And for the first time in nearly a decade, she allows herself to need someone. For Will’s sake. 

She hates that it feels good to need him. Like slipping into an old comfortable pair of sneakers, when it shouldn’t feel familiar because she never once  _ needed _ him. Not when her mom tossed her out during the last week of her junior year. Not when he showed up to arrest Lonnie after a young Jonathan called the police when he returned from the bar with a vendetta against Joyce, and certainly not after Will returned home safely. 

But the boys admired Hopper and she was determined to do good by them, so she invites him to dinner and protests mildly when he offers to repair broken items around the house, insisting she didn’t need his help. 

He gives it anyway, showing up before she gets off work and telling the boys that their mom would always be too proud to accept his help, even when she needed it. 

She notices he doesn’t come around as much when she begins dating Bob, another decision she convinces herself she’s making for the boys. They need a good male role model and Bob is kind and smart and  _ simple.  _ Bob doesn’t try and fix every broken faucet or ask what he can do for her. He lets her go on feeling independent and loves her, and for that she loves him.

Then, without warning, Bob is gone and she finds herself in a position to need Hopper. She resists, initially, but concedes to the instinct that tells her to run to him, and for the second time in her adult life, Joyce lets herself need someone. 

It’s fleeting, the need. Something Joyce insists is temporary and so she holds Hopper at arm's length in a desperate attempt to prove to herself that she could be without him. They’d been in and out of each other’s lives for years, if she hadn’t needed him back then, she certainly didn’t need him now. 

Staring out her kitchen window at the darkened sky, the rain washing away the cobwebs that graced the outer shell of the window, she thinks back on the summer after their senior year, when she was desperate to believe she was better off on her own. 

_ It was a week after Hopper told her he was leaving Hawkins, and she felt a deep betrayal she struggled to vocalize. Over the course of their senior year, she’d allowed herself to depend on her friendship with Hopper. Having been friends since they were freshmen, she’d finally allowed him to be one of the few people to know the real her and she might even dare to say he’d become her best friend.  _

_ The night he told her he was leaving Hawkins (and her) she made a promise to herself that she would never depend on anyone ever again. She’d been a fool to get so close to him and now she was going to have to say goodbye to the only person who understood her. The only person she ever let herself need.  _

_ He was trying to apologize by offering her a ride home, which she stubbornly refused and began the mile-long journey back to her house on foot. With her backpack tossed over her shoulders, she folded her arms across her chest and began walking the length of the side road that led to her house.  _

_ She could hear him driving behind her, slowly rolling along in his dad’s car. Refusing to give in, she stared straight ahead and kept walking as the raindrops spilling from the ominous clouds overhead began to fall faster.  _

_ By the time she reached the end of the street, it was pouring hard and she could hear him calling to her from the cabin of the car.  _

_ “Joyce, would you please just get in the car!” he called out to her.  _

_ She ignored him and continued walking.  _

_ “Joyce,” he tried again. “You’re going to catch a cold.” _

_ “Why do you care?” she snapped back. She continued walking and from behind her she recalls hearing his car come to a stop and the door slam shut.  _

_ Within moments he was reaching for her shoulder to stop her from walking.  _

_ “I care.” He nodded, an honest look in his eyes as he stared at her through the falling raindrops. One of them lands on her nose and rolls down the side of her cheek, her hair had become matted to her cheeks and her clothes were soaked.  _

_ “Why?” she challenged him.  _

_ “Because I fucking care about you Joyce!” he exclaimed, tossing his arms up over his head in frustration.  _

_ “Maybe you shouldn’t!”  _

_ Instead of responding, he lunged forward and closed the distance between them, his lips crashing into hers with a force so impressive she’s shocked they didn’t fall over. When he pulled back, he stared at her with wide eyes and waited for her to respond.  _

_ “You shouldn’t have done that Hop.” _

_ “I don’t care, I wanted to.” He sighed. He closed the distance between them before she had a chance to protest and they stood there, kissing in the rain until the cold began to seep through her clothes and she let him drive her home.  _

_ They never dated. Though they did spend the rest of the summer becoming familiar with one another in a way that surpassed the boundaries of a typical friendship. _

  
  


A sharp crackle from the storm outside calls Joyce back to the present and she looks down at the sink and smiles. Looking back on it, she realized that despite her stubborn habits, she’d always needed Jim. It was what made saying goodbye to him seem impossibly hard. Why she feared he may not believe her when she first went to him when Will went missing, and it was the reason they kept finding their way back to one another. 

Truth be told, she liked having him around. He made her feel safe, made her boys feel safe and heard. Stubborn as she may be, his help made her life a million times easier and she had grown to appreciate his presence at the dinner table. She looked forward to getting off work and finding him waiting on her porch, that ridiculously charming grin plastered on his face, just for her. 

She could learn to live with the fact that she needed Jim Hopper.

“Mom,” Will’s voice rings from the living room. “When will dinner be ready?”

“Ten minutes,” she responds. 

“Are the Chief and El still coming?”

“I’m not sure baby, they might not because of the storm. I’ll give them a call in a minute.” 

She forgot it was Thursday, the night Hopper and El joined them for dinner. As she stares out the window again, the magnitude of what she’s just realized washes over her. She  _ needed _ him. It’d only taken her years to admit it, but she knew it was true. She had always needed him. 

She needed him in  _ all _ senses of the word, and god, it was crazy but it was true; hidden right there beneath the surface for god knows how long. Joyce is so caught up in her own thoughts, she forgets to dial Hopper and ask if he and El are still coming to dinner, and next thing she knows there’s a knock at the door. 

She scurries to open it and finds El, beaming on the other side while Hopper is still at the truck. She tells El to go on in and play with Will until dinner is ready, and lingers in the threshold of the door, waiting for Hopper. 

“Hey, you didn’t have to wait out here, I know the way,” Hopper says as he marches up the porch steps. 

“I know but…” But what? She needed him? Was it that simple? She only just realized herself but now he’s standing in front of her and the softness in his smile and the way he looks at her make her lose all sense of logic. 

“I need you..” she breathes, the words take her breath away, hearing them out loud for the first time it suddenly occurs to her that he may not need her. And that thought is pain-striking and terrifying, but she can’t take the words back and she’s stuck in a panic until he responds. 

“To what?” he asks absentmindedly.

She draws in a deep breath and looks up at him, willing the courage that the high school version of herself once had. 

“No,” she shakes her head, stepping out onto the porch and towards him. “Just you.” 

He stares down at her and blinks, processing before he slowly drags a hand through his hair and shakes his head, chuckling. 

“What’s so funny?” she asks defensively. She instantly regrets her impulsiveness and pulls her hands to her chest, an old habit designed to make herself feel smaller. 

“It’s not funny… it’s just… do you know how many times I’ve thought about telling you that exact same thing?” 

A wave of relief overcomes her and her arms slip to her sides. “Why haven’t you?”

“Honestly, I didn’t think I was good enough for you. Never have been. When I first came back to Hawkins I thought of calling you but by the time I got around to it I figured you must’ve heard the rumours and you deserve more.”

“Hop,” she says softly, “that was years ago. You’ve changed a lot.”

“I have you to thank for that. And the kid of course. I need you too, Joyce. But I understand if maybe you...”

“Hey Hop,” she smirks, “just stop talking and kiss me.” 


End file.
